This poetry and short prose collection displays an obsession with memories: how they fade from us and what we lose when one forgets them. George Messo creates an overwhelming feeling of cold darkness in The Invention of Lars Ruth. The collection is separated into two sections, ‘The Invention of Lars Ruth’ and ‘Cuckoo Taiga’ and dispersed through the text are eerie sketches, like a scribble of a place someone is forgetting.
We always find ourselves back within poetry, both as a response to cultural phenomena and personal events (for example, weddings or funerals), Frears says. Although it is a niche form, it constantly surrounds us.
Published in 2019 by The Emma Press, Wain is a reimagining of Scottish folklore with an LGBT focus. After receiving the 2016 Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award, Plummer was commissioned by LGBT Youth Scotland to write what would become Wain. They describe the experience as fantastic and recall discussions they had with some of the staff there: ‘as LGBT people reading folklore and fairytales when we were younger we often identified more with the monster or the villain or this idea of considering ourselves to be in some way monstrous because of how society portrays us’
In her first collection, Forty Names, Fayyaz names these women over and over again and often women from her family, whose stories she grew up being told even if, at the time, she didn’t fully understand them. Names are echoed, written first in Persian and then translated into English – an act which revels in the ‘emotional and imaginative’ aspects of translation, as Fayyaz discusses in a Youtube video for Carcanet. The effect is such that the names become almost internalised mini-poems in and of themselves…
Angela Gardner delivers a theatrical experience with this remarkable verse novel. This powerful true story lays bare one of the most important trials in Seafaring history. Told in five parts, Gardner takes us on an emotional voyage from elation to fear, horror to sorrow, injustice to fate.
Andrés N. Ordorica (404Ink, 2022); pbk, £9.99 What does it mean to belong somewhere? In a body, in a family, in a writing group, in a country? These are the questions that inhabit this debut collection from Andrés N. Ordorica, a queer Latinx poet now based in Edinburgh, having lived in Mexico and the USA. Read More
If it is true that there’s nothing new under the sun, then Harry Josephine Giles has the ability to create an utterly convincing mirage of originality by crashing old ideas into each other. Whatever you think of Deep Wheel Orcadia, it would be difficult to argue that this work could have come from a mind other than theirs.
The Sun is Open is a poetry collection from Northern Irish poet and academic Gail McConnell. McConnell had previously published two poetry pamphlets, Fourteen (2018) and Fothermather (2019).
From the very first page which details the tragic death of McConnell’s father by a bullet in front of her three-year-old self, it is made immediately clear to the reader that this will be a difficult and confrontational read.
Far-reaching in his enquiry, Michael Symmons Roberts in Ransom, his eighth published collection of poetry, addresses some fundamental issues about human nature – who and what guides us, and in turn keeps us in thrall. Some poems have a more traditional meditative rendering while others tend more toward the performative, riffing off contemporary themes about living in the city. Yet, all are united by the ubiquitous theme of ransom. Jeanette Winterson has monikered Roberts as a religious poet for the secular age. Reading through the sequences in this collection, I can see why for it understands ransom as levied on us by how we live now, the creeds we might follow, our education, to say nothing about the cultural and ethical legacies of the past.
Victoria Kennefick’s latest collection, Eat Or We Both Starve, is a considered and powerful meditation on what it means to hunger and, subsequently, to consume. Kennefick weaves historical figures, literary references and personal memories into her work in a painstaking attempt to examine hunger in its myriad forms – be it physical, sexual, relational or spiritual. At times, the poems are so interconnected in theme that the entire collection feels concentrated into one sharp burst of writing. Yet it is clear that Kennefick’s process has been refined and reoriented, as many of the poems contain a wisdom and strength – the voice of an embodied womanhood.